quentin collins – Page 14 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 702: There are many times. You only have to find them.

We open in the secret chamber in the old Collins family mausoleum, where the woe-begotten Sandor Rákóczi has inadvertently freed vampire Barnabas Collins from his coffin. When dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis freed Barnabas from the same coffin in 1967, Barnabas bit him on the wrist, because ABC-TV’s office of Standards and Practices wouldn’t allow one man to bite another on the neck. But now the ratings are high enough that the network will let Dark Shadows get away with a whole lot more than they would when the show was losing its time slot. So Sandor winds up with two big gashes near his right carotid artery.

Barnabas asks Sandor what year it is. He is shocked to find that it is 1897. The last Barnabas remembered, it was 1969 and he was going into a trance mediated by the casting of I Ching wands. Evidently he had hoped that he would encounter the ghost of Quentin Collins on an astral plane outside time and space and do battle with him for the souls of various characters who live at the great house of Collinwood in the 1960s. But instead he has been transported back to the period when Quentin was alive. In fact, Sandor tells him that this very night Quentin returned to Collinwood after a year away.

A few days before he left on this uncertain and frightening journey into the past, Barnabas reflected that when Quentin was alive, he lay in his coffin. They knew nothing of each other. By that time, Barnabas had been free of the effects of the vampire curse for almost a year. He did travel back in time once before, when he spent episodes #661-665 in the 1790s, and the curse reasserted itself then. So regular viewers should have taken that reflection as a hint that Barnabas might return to Quentin’s time and once more be the vampire he was in his first months on the show.

Barnabas is shocked to find that Sandor and his wife Magda live in the Old House at Collinwood. That was Barnabas’ home when he was alive in the eighteenth century, and he became its master again when he returned in the 1960s. He orders Sandor to get him some clothes; Sandor replies “I won’t get you nothing.” Barnabas tells him that he will do whatever he says. In a very hard voice, he says “You are a Gypsy.” As Sandor, Thayer David indeed wears a stereotypical Romani costume, complete with earrings, a flowing wig, and brownface makeup. It sometimes strikes me as odd that Barnabas’ first meal in 1897 was blackened whitefish. Barnabas follows this ethnic identification with “You know what will happen to you if you do not.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, made it clear that Sinti and Romani people are experts on vampirism, so I guess Barnabas had some grounds for that statement. At any rate, Sandor does comply.

Magda is on her way to the great house. The mistress of the estate, Sandor and Magda’s patroness Edith Collins, has summoned Magda to visit her as she lies on her deathbed. She wants Magda to read the cards and tell her that her grandson Edward will come home before she dies. As she enters the house, Magda is waylaid by Quentin.

Quentin grabs Magda by the neck. When she protests, he threatens to do it harder. He tells her that when Edith dies, she and Sandor will be thrown off the estate. Magda says she expects that, but Quentin says it needs not be so. If she can persuade Edith to leave all her money to him, he will cut her and Sandor in for 10%. Magda does not agree. Quentin says that he is their only hope, because “I have no prejudices against your kind.” If this is how people with no prejudices against them treat Romani, you can just imagine how the bigots behave.

In fact, you don’t have to imagine for long. After an interlude with Barnabas looking over the interior of the Old House and showing dismay at its poor condition, we return to the great house. Quentin’s older sister Judith comes downstairs and sees Magda. She reacts with unconcealed disgust. Magda excuses herself, and Judith takes Quentin into the drawing room.

Judith closes the drawing room doors, complaining that the servants keep listening in. That is one of many indications that there are no background characters in 1897- everyone is playing an angle. Judith offers Quentin $1500 to go away. Quentin says that he is surprised how highly she thinks of him. He could easily spend that much before dawn, even in the village of Collinsport, and come back the next day claiming to know nothing about it. She mentions something about his word of honor, but neither of them can take that seriously enough to merit a complete sentence.

Quentin insists on seeing their nephew, 12 year old Jamison Collins. Judith complains that it is late and Jamison is asleep, but Quentin says he promised to wake Jamison as soon as he arrived, regardless of the time, and “I keep my promises to Jamison.” When Jamison does come in, Quentin is hiding. Jamison protests that he is too old for such games. Quentin jumps out and startles Jamison. Quentin takes this reaction as proof that Jamison isn’t too old at all, and the two of them share a happy laugh. Quentin gives Jamison a model ship with a plate reading “The Jamison Collins.” Jamison is delighted with this truly thoughtful gift. Judith appears, and Jamison clutches Quentin, shouting “I won’t say it! I don’t want Quentin to leave!”

In 1969, Quentin’s ghost has taken possession of strange and troubled boy David Collins, who like Jamison is played by David Henesy. He wants David to turn into Jamison, in which process he will die. It was to save David’s life that Barnabas meditated upon the I Ching and entered the trance. In this scene we learn that Quentin’s deadly attachment to the image of Jamison had its origin in a healthy love for the living Jamison.

This may suggest a parallel to regular viewers. In his first months on the show, Barnabas was hung up on his lost love, the gracious Josette, and embarked on monstrously evil schemes to turn various living women into vampiric replicas of her. We then had a long flashback to the late eighteenth century, in which we saw that Barnabas and Josette once loved each other and were happy, until a cruel fate ruined everything for them. With Quentin and Jamison, we see that it is not only sexual love, but also the filial love of uncle and nephew that can be twisted into something dark and murderous.

It is not just the audience- Barnabas, too, is thinking of Josette. In the Old House, he meets Magda and demands to know where the portrait of Josette that once hung over the fireplace has gone. “Did you pawn it?” he demands, in a contemptuous tone that admits of no response. He asks who sleeps in Josette’s old bedroom upstairs. When Magda says she does, he declares that he “will not have it!” Magda asks who he is to be so imperious about what he will “have,” and Sandor begs her to be respectful towards him. In view of Quentin’s casual violence towards Magda, Judith’s flagrant loathing of her, and Edith’s hobby of keeping her and Sandor around to amuse her by performing the broadest possible stereotypes of the Sinti and Romani, there can be little doubt that Barnabas’ rage is not just at the idea of a stranger occupying the holy place of his idealized beloved, but at the sight of a member of an ethnic group he has been raised to consider inferior occupying it.

Barnabas lays down the law. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin comes calling. Barnabas hides behind the barred window of the cellar door. Quentin badgers Magda for information about her meeting with Edith, and Sandor says that she is ill and will talk to him tomorrow. Quentin can tell something very strange is going on, but ultimately has to leave without further information.

Once Quentin is gone, it is Magda’s turn to press Sandor for answers. She tells Sandor that Barnabas has “the mark of death” on him, and demands to know who he is. She grabs the hand with which Sandor has been holding a kerchief at his neck and sees the bite marks. She gasps, turns to the cellar door, and exclaims “Vampire!”

Barnabas’ portrait was first seen in #204, he was first named in #205, he first appeared in #210, and he first spoke in #211. But it was not until #410 that anyone spoke the word “vampire” on screen. Up to that point, they had used a number of circumlocutions and ambiguous terms, such as “the undead.” For a while, it looked like Barnabas might not turn out to be a vampire exactly, but some other kind of monster who only occasionally sucks blood, as a treat. It’s a relief that people were more direct in 1897.

Episode 701: Welcome home the prodigal

We begin the part of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 with an episode featuring a glittering script, a strong cast, and a hopeless director. Henry Kaplan’s visual style consisted of little more than one closeup after another. The first real scene in the episode introduces us to Sandor and Magda Rákóczi, a Romani couple who live in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. They bicker while Sandor throws knives at the wall. Thayer David really is throwing knives, but since we cut between closeups of the targets and of the actors we cannot see anything dynamic in that action. He may as well be whittling.

Magda ridicules Sandor’s pretensions as a knife-thrower and as a patent medicine salesman, and busies herself with a crystal ball. She tells him that when “the old lady” dies, they will have to leave Collinwood. He says he knows all about that. She wants him to steal the Collins family jewels so that they can leave with great riches. He eventually caves in and sets out for the great house on the estate, more to escape her nagging than out of greed.

Regular viewers will remember that we heard Magda’s name in December 1968. The show had introduced two storylines, one about the malevolent ghost of Quentin Collins and the other about werewolf Chris Jennings, and the characters were starting to notice the strange goings-on that Quentin and Chris generated. The adults in the great house had no idea that Quentin was haunting them or that Chris was a werewolf, so they held a séance in #642. Speaking through heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, Magda mentioned “My curse!” and said that “He must not come back!” It was clear in the context of the episode that the “He” who “must not come back” was Quentin. Chris was a participant in the séance, and he broke the circle before Magda could explain what she meant by her “curse.” Séances held in #170 and #281 were cut short by the person whose secret the medium was about to expose; that it is Chris who interrupts this one would suggest to longtime viewers that Magda not only knew Quentin, but that the curse she is about to explain was the one that made Chris a werewolf. Carolyn and her uncle Roger Collins talked a little about Magda in #643, and psychic investigator Janet Findley sensed the ghostly presence of a woman whose name started with an “M” in #648. We haven’t heard about Magda since.

As the living Magda, Grayson Hall manages rather a more natural accent than Nancy Barrett had when channeling her concerns about “my currrrrssssse.” The exaggerated costumes Hall and Thayer David wear make sense when we hear them reminiscing about the old days, when they made their livings as stage Gypsies with a knife-throwing act, Tarot card readings, and a magic elixir. Even the fact that Magda is peering into a crystal ball during this scene is understandable when they make it clear that they are staying in the Old House as guests of the mistress of the great house, an old, dying lady who enjoys their broadly stereotypical antics. But there is no way to reconcile twenty-first century sensibilities to Hall and David’s brownface makeup. Some time later, Hall would claim that one of her grandmothers was Romani. If that was a lie, it is telling that only someone as phenomenally sophisticated as Hall could in the 1970s see that she would need to invent a story to excuse playing such a character.

Objectionable as Sandor and Magda are, their dialogue is so well-written and so well delivered that we want to like them. Moreover, the year 1897 points to another reason fans of Dark Shadows might be happy enough to see Romani or Sinti characters that they will overlook the racist aspects of their portrayal. It was in 1897 that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published, and it depicted the evil Count as surrounded by “Gypsy” thralls. The character who has brought us on this journey into the past is Barnabas Collins, and upon his arrival he found that he was once more a vampire.

In addition to the strengths of the dialogue, the acting, and the intertext, there is also a weakness in this episode that softens the blow of the brownface. Today the picture is so muddy that it is possible to overlook the makeup. That’s Kaplan’s fault. It would often be the case that one or the other of the cameras wasn’t up to standard, but when the director was a visual artist as capable as Lela Swift or John Sedwick, there would always be at least some shots in a scene using the good camera, and others where the lighting would alleviate some of the consequences of the technical difficulties. But Kaplan doesn’t seem to have cared at all. He had made up his mind to use a particular camera to shoot the Old House parlor with a subdued lighting scheme, and if that camera was not picking up the full range of color, too bad. He’d photograph a lot of sludge and call it a day.

Meanwhile, a man knocks on the door of the great house. He is Quentin, and the person who opens the door is Beth Chavez. We first saw these two as ghosts in #646. Beth spoke some lines during the “Haunting of Collinwood” story, but Quentin’s voice was heard only in his menacing laugh.

We already know Quentin as the evil spirit who drove everyone from the house and is killing strange and troubled boy David Collins in February of 1969. His behavior in this scene is no less abominable than we might there by have come to expect. He pushes past Beth to force his way into the foyer, does not bother to deny that he has come back to persuade his dying grandmother to leave him her money, pretends to have forgotten someone named “Jenny,” makes Beth feel uncomfortable by saying that her association with Jenny makes her position in the house precarious, orders Beth to carry his bags, twists her arm, and leeringly tells her that she would be much happier if she would just submit to his charms. David Selby sells the scene, and we believe that Quentin is a villain who must be stopped. But Mr Selby himself is so charming, and the dialogue in which he makes his unforgivable declarations is so witty, that we don’t want him to go away. He establishes himself at once as The Man You Love to Hate.

In an upstairs bedroom, the aged Edith Collins is looking at Tarot cards. Quentin makes his way to her; she expresses her vigorous disapproval of him. She says that “When Jamison brought me the letter, I said to myself ‘He is the same. Quentin is using the child to get back.'” Quentin replies “But you let me come back.” She says that she did, and admits that he makes her feel young. With that, Edith identifies herself with the audience’s point of view.

The reference to Jamison and a letter reminds regular viewers of #643, when Magda’s ghost caused a letter from Quentin to fall into Roger’s hands. It was addressed to Roger’s father, Jamison, and was written in 1887. It read “Dear Jamison, You must return to Collinwood. I need your help. You must intercede with Oscar. Only you can save me.” They’ve revised the flimsies quite a bit since then; now it is 1897, Jamison is 12, and we don’t hear about anyone named Oscar.

Not about any character named Oscar, anyway. Edith tells Quentin that “Men who live as you do will not age well.” Quentin tells Edith that she ought not to believe in the Tarot, because “This card always has the same picture and people change, even I.” On Dark Shadows, which from its beginning has taken place on sets dominated by portraits, these two lines might make us wonder what it would be like if it were portraits that changed while their subjects remained the same. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was published in serial form in 1890 and as a novel in 1891, and it was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. The dialogue is so witty that the characters must be well-read, making it quite plausible that Quentin’s remark was meant to remind Edith of the book. Especially so, since Wilde was released from prison in 1897, bringing him back to public notice in that year.

Edith tells Quentin that old and sick as she may be, she can still out-think him. She declares that all of her grandchildren will get what they deserve. All, that is, except Edward. Roger mentioned Edward in #697, naming him as his grandfather and Jamison’s father. Edith says that Edward is the eldest, and therefore she must tell him “the secret.” There is a note of horror in her voice as she says this; Quentin misses that note, and reflexively urges her to tell him the secret. She only shakes her head- the secret isn’t a prize to contend for, it is a burden to lament.

Isabella Hoopes plays this scene lying on her side in bed, a challenging position for any performer. Her delivery is a bit stilted at the beginning, but after she makes eye contact with David Selby she warms up and becomes very natural. I wonder if the initial awkwardness had to do with Kaplan. He held a conductor’s baton while directing, and he used to poke actresses with it. I can’t imagine a person in bed wearing a nightgown would have an easy time relaxing if her attention was focused on him. Once she can connect with Mr Selby, though, you can see what an outstanding professional she was.

Quentin goes to the drawing room, and finds Sandor behind the curtains. He threatens to call the police, and Sandor slinks back to the Old House. Magda berates him for his failure to steal the jewels, and he insists there are no jewels in the great house.

Meanwhile, Barnabas is in his coffin, trying to will someone to come and release him. In #210, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis had become obsessed with Barnabas’ portrait in the foyer of the great house, so much so that he could hear Barnabas’ heart beating through it. Barnabas called Willie to come to the secret chamber in the old Collins family mausoleum where his coffin was hidden. In his conscious mind, Willie thought he was going to steal a fortune in jewels. His face distorted with the gleeful expectation of that bonanza, he broke the chains that bound the coffin shut, and Barnabas’ hand darted out, choking him and pulling him down.

In the Old House, an image suddenly appears in the crystal ball. We can see it, the first time they have actually projected an image in such a ball since the first one made its debut in #48.

Picture in picture. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda notices the image, and tells Sandor to look. He recognizes the old mausoleum. She says that the jewels must be in “the room,” implying that they already know about the hidden panel and the secret chamber behind it. Sandor says it is absurd to imagine Edith going to and from the mausoleum to retrieve pieces of her jewelry collection. Magda ignores this, and urges him to go there. He reluctantly agrees to go with her.

The two of them are heading for the door when they hear a knock. It is Beth, come to say that Edith wants to see Magda. Edith wants what she always wants- to be told that Edward will return before she dies. Sandor says Magda can’t go, but Beth says she will regret it for the rest of her life if she does not. Magda tells Sandor to go on his way without her, and says that she will bring Edith some ancient Gypsy cards, cards older than the Tarot. When she talks about Romani lore, Magda taunts Beth- “but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Her sarcastic tone implies that Beth has tried to conceal her own Romani heritage.

Sandor opens the secret panel and looks at the chained coffin. He tells himself the jewels can’t be hidden there, then decides he may as well open it anyway- if he doesn’t, Magda will just send him back. Longtime viewers remembering the frenzy in which Willie opened the coffin in #210 will be struck by the utterly lackadaisical attitude with which Sandor performs the same task. Men’s lust for riches may release the vampire, but so too may their annoyance with the wife when she won’t stop carping on the same old thing.

When Willie opened the coffin, it lay across the frame lengthwise and he was behind it. When he raised the lid it blocked our view of his middle. We could see only his face when he realized what he had done, and could see nothing of Barnabas but his hand. The result was an iconic image.

Farewell, dangerously unstable ruffian- hello, sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Sandor opens the coffin, its end is toward us. We see Barnabas at the same time he does. Barnabas’ hand darts up, and also for some reason his foot. The camera zooms in as Barnabas clutches Sandor’s throat. Unfortunately, the shot is so dimly lit that not all viewers will see this. My wife, Mrs Acilius, has eyesight that is in some ways a bit below average, and she missed it completely, even on a modern big-screen television. It’s anyone’s guess how many viewers would have known what was going on when they were watching it on the little TV sets of March 1969, on an ABC affiliate which was more likely than not the station that came in with the poorest picture quality in the area. As a result, the image that marks the relaunch of Barnabas’ career as a vampire is nothing at all. There is so much good stuff in the episode that it easily earns the “Genuinely Good” tag, but Kaplan’s bungling of this final shot is a severe failure.

Grab and kick, and one and two! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 700: Beyond the door, anything is possible

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and governess Maggie Evans make their way into a dusty little room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Until last week, the ancient and esteemed Collins family lived in the main part of the great house, but now the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins has emerged from the west wing and made life unbearable there. They have taken refuge in Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the same estate. Maggie’s charges, twelve year old David Collins and nine year old Amy Jennings, are possessed by Quentin, and David has gone missing.

Last night Maggie had a dream in which she entered this room, found a hole in the wall, and saw a door on the other side. She passed through that door and found a chamber crowded with Victorian bric-a-brac. She met Quentin there, and he gave her a kiss that looked very pleasant indeed. After she awoke, Maggie decided that she would go to the room to see if there was such a chamber behind the wall, convinced she would find David there. Or maybe that she would get another kiss, who can say.

Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, told Maggie it was far too dangerous for anyone to go to the great house alone, and insisted Barnabas accompany her on her expedition. This would seem to reduce the likelihood of another smooch from Quentin, but Maggie acquiesced.

Before we see Maggie and Barnabas, we are treated to a closeup of the tailor’s dummy to whom David referred in #681 as “Mr Juggins.” The camera pulls back, and we see that Mr Juggins is standing in front of a stone bust and next to a globe. The effect is quite stately. Unfortunately, this is Mr Juggins’ final appearance on the show. I think he had a lot of potential.

Barnabas and Maggie finds that there is indeed an opening where she had dreamed one would be and a door behind it. Barnabas pries the rest of the paneling off the false wall, and they enter the chamber beyond. Maggie confirms that it matches her dream perfectly.

They are marveling at this discovery, one made possible only by the intervention of whatever supernatural agency sent Maggie’s dream, when the doorknob starts turning. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes enters.

Maggie and Barnabas look wonderingly at Stokes, and ask how he knew about the chamber. Regular viewers will be at least as surprised to see him as they are. Stokes tells them he was searching a nearby corridor and could hear the noise Barnabas made when he ripped the paneling out. That deflates the moment a little, but does leave us with a sense that there is more to Stokes than we know.

Stokes joins Barnabas and Maggie in searching the chamber, and quickly finds Amy hiding behind a curtain. Amy passes out, and the men urge Maggie to take her to the Old House. Alone with Barnabas, Stokes finds a set of I Ching wands and a couple of books in a desk. He says that it tells him a great deal about Quentin that he had these things. He also says that they will never find David by searching the house- the only way to rescue him is by studying the I Ching.

Maggie has taken Amy back to the Old House. There, Amy suddenly exclaims “Stokes is wrong!” Evidently whatever spirit is possessing Amy is streaming audio from Quentin’s chamber. Maggie asks what she means, and Amy avers that David is in the great house, but that he will soon be entirely subsumed by the spirit of his grandfather Jamison. Maggie rushes out to get him.

We cut back to the great house. Maggie enters the foyer, and David comes to the head of the stairs. She calls to him; he answers and calls her by name, but is struggling. The door at the head of the stairs opens, indicating that Quentin is there. Maggie confronts him and demands David do the same. David struggles further. He is in Maggie’s arms when the door closes, indicating Quentin has left. Maggie exclaims “We won! We won!” But there is no victory. David collapses. Maggie takes him back to the Old House, where Julia examines him and concludes that he will be dead within hours unless the possession is broken.

This situation is familiar to longtime viewers. Dark Shadows version 1.0 ran from June 1966 to March 1967. Its main theme was David’s difficult relationship with Maggie’s predecessor as his governess, Vicki Winters. It reached its end in #191, when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, tried to kill him. At the last moment, David ran from Laura into Vicki’s arms. With that, he had chosen life over death, and the story of Vicki and David had nowhere to go.

Maggie and Vicki were close friends, and so we can suppose she heard all about how David escaped from Laura. She knows what we know, and so she must feel the same shock we do when the scenario does not reach the same happy ending.

As David’s embrace of Vicki marked the end of Dark Shadows 1.0, his embrace of Maggie today marks the end of Dark Shadows 5.0.* This iteration of the show has focused on two intertwined stories. They concern werewolf Chris Jennings and the ghost of Quentin. Chris’ lycanthropy has been getting steadily more aggressive, and now he cannot revert to his human form at all. Quentin’s power has been growing in tandem with the expansion of Chris’ curse, so that there is nothing left for him to achieve. Both of these stories have, therefore, reached their conclusion. Moreover, the great house has been the constant element at the center of the show. Now that it is closed to the surviving characters, they cannot pick up a new plot and continue the series. It seems that this is to be the final episode of Dark Shadows.

In November 1967, it seemed that Dark Shadows had foreclosed every possible avenue of story development. The characters gathered for a séance, something we had seen them do three times before. Those previous séances had been dramatic high points, but this one had an outcome unlike anything we had seen. Vicki vanished from the circle. A woman unknown to the company took her place and identified herself as Phyllis Wick, governess at Collinwood in the year 1795. She and Vicki had traded places. Vicki took us with her, and for the next four months Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. The result was a triumph that turned the show into a full-fledged hit, one of the major pop culture phenomena of the 1960s.

By now, we’ve seen ten séances, and they’ve gotten sloppy with them. In #600, a séance to contact someone named Philippe Cordier takes less time and trouble than it would have in 1969 to place a station-to-station telephone call. In #682, four characters held a séance in which no one objected when the medium went into the trance, breaking from a ritual form they had observed very strictly up to that point. In #698, we even heard about a séance held off-screen. So it is unlikely they will use a séance to get us from the conclusion of Dark Shadows 5.0 to the beginning of whatever it is that will compose Dark Shadows 6.0.

Barnabas and Stokes take Quentin’s I Ching wands and books to the basement the Old House, where Julia joins them. Stokes explains the I Ching more or less accurately, then Barnabas decides he will use the wands in an attempt to communicate with Quentin. Stokes warns him that the effects of the method are extremely unpredictable, and Julia keeps trying to stop the proceedings. Among them, the three represent the roles of convener, medium, and objector that we have seen in one séance after another.

But Quentin does not speak through any of the participants. Instead, Barnabas’ spirit leaves his body and walks towards a door. He opens it, and finds a coffin on the other side. It seems he is about to become a vampire again, as he was for the 172 years ending in March 1968. He is able to speak while this is going on; Julia knows what he means when he mentions a coffin and a mausoleum. Stokes is not a party to their criminal conspiracies, and so is puzzled. He asks Julia if she knows what Barnabas is talking about, and it is obvious that she is lying when she says she does not. Barnabas heads off towards the chained coffin, and an entirely new show.

Barnabas returns to the darkness from which he came. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*Version 2.0, running from March 1967 to November 1967, introduced Barnabas as a vampire. Barnabas occasionally preyed upon the living, but spent most of his time trying to fit in to the twentieth century. He was so successful in that project that matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard gave him the Old House on the estate of Collinwood to live in, and the viewing public started tuning in in large numbers.

Version 3.0, running from November 1967 to March 1968, was the 1790s segment. It was the inverse of version 2.0. Vicki’s attempt to navigate an alien time failed as spectacularly as Barnabas had succeeded, getting her condemned to death by the other characters and losing the loyalty of the audience.

Version 4.0 was a Monster Mash full of creatures familiar from Universal Pictures horror films of the 1930s; it ran from March to November 1968, and its main theme turned out to be the growing friendship between Barnabas and Julia.

Episode 699: If only I could put these images into some kind of a sequence

In the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, nine year old Amy Jennings pops into her governess’ bedroom in the morning. The governess, Maggie Evans, hasn’t been to bed yet. Maggie’s other charge, twelve year old David Collins, disappeared into the haunted corridors of the great house on the estate some time ago, and cannot be found. The evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins has been possessing David and Amy off and on for many weeks, and has now grown so powerful that no one dares go into the great house alone. Maggie is too worried to go to bed.

Maggie questions Amy about David and Quentin. Amy tries to deny knowing anything about Quentin, but Maggie keeps up the pressure until Amy admits she is afraid that if she talks, Quentin will do something to her big brother Chris Jennings. Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman overhears this admission, and demands to know what Quentin has to do with Chris.

Julia knows something neither Maggie nor Amy does. Chris is a werewolf. As Quentin’s power over the children and the great house has grown, so has Chris’ lycanthropy spread over more of the month. For the past several years, Chris took his wolf form only for the two or three nights the moon was fullest, never for more than four nights, and never during any other lunar phase. Now he has started changing even when the moon is new. What is more, Julia and her friend, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, just came from the chamber where they coop Chris up when he is the werewolf. They found that he has not changed back even though the sun has been up for two hours. They have no way of knowing when or if Chris will ever be human again.

Amy won’t tell Julia or Maggie anything more about Quentin or about Quentin’s fellow ghost, Beth. Amy has communicated with Beth, knows her name, and she and David first saw Beth with Quentin. She knows also that Beth weeps when she thinks of Chris suffering. For their part, Julia and Barnabas saw Beth when she led them to save Chris when Quentin had tried to kill him. Chris told them that Beth had appeared to him, and when he took Barnabas to the spot where that happened he and Barnabas found a shovel and excavated the unmarked grave of an infant wearing a pendant meant to ward off werewolves. Julia saw a photograph of Beth in an old Collins family album, dated 1897, the same year Quentin disappeared. If they could combine Amy’s knowledge about Beth with what they have learned from these three experiences, Barnabas and Julia might get somewhere.

Julia and Amy leave, and Maggie goes to bed. As she lies under the covers, we see visual effects that might have been impressive on daytime television in 1969, but that we all got pretty sick of seeing people use on video calls in 2020. The picture wiggles in the middle and a transparent sticker of Quentin’s face sweeps around the screen.

Quentin sticker. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie has a dream. Dream sequences on Dark Shadows are usually messages sent to the dreamer by some supernatural force; the sticker of Quentin’s face suggests at first that he is the sender of this message. Maggie goes to a room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house. She was in the room in #680, and saw Quentin there. When she took matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and David to the room in #681, there was a tailor’s dummy wearing Quentin’s frock coat, with a face and mutton chops painted on it. Liz was glad to believe that the dummy was what Maggie saw, and David nattered on about how he and Amy called the dummy “Mr Juggins.” In her dream, Maggie recognizes Mr Juggins, then sees an opening in the wall.

Mr Juggins startles Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

She goes through it, and finds a hidden chamber. Quentin is there. Quentin tried to strangle Maggie in #691, and earlier this week he dressed her up in a lovely outfit and did her hair in an elaborate up-do, so there’s really no telling what is going to happen when the two of them are alone together. This time, he kisses her passionately, and from the way she relaxes in his arms it is clear he is doing a great job.

Awake, Maggie tells Julia about her dream. This will bring back memories for longtime viewers. When we first saw Julia in #265, she was Maggie’s psychiatrist, and was asking her about, among other things, her dreams. The same viewers will have been marveling at the fact that Maggie is staying in the room of the Old House once occupied by the gracious Josette and now dominated by Josette’s portrait. In May and June of 1967, Barnabas was a vampire. He held Maggie prisoner in Josette’s room as part of his scheme to erase her personality and replace it with Josette’s. Julia hypnotized Maggie into forgetting that whole ordeal, and the show has recently been assuring us that they will not revisit the question of whether her memory will return. Putting her back in the room is their most heavy-handed way yet of telling us to stop wondering about that.

Maggie’s discussion with Julia also raises the question of who sent the dream. Had she responded to it by slipping out to the west wing without telling anyone where she was going, we could believe that Quentin was luring her to him by showing her what a good kisser he is. But this conference makes it clear that Maggie is not only consciously determined to do battle against Quentin, but that she is enlisting the support of the allies likeliest to make headway against him. Beth has done a great deal to warn people against Quentin, so she might have sent the dream. Since Maggie is in Josette’s room and the closing credits will run over a shot centered on Josette’s portrait, it is also possible that Josette’s ghost has returned to the business of sending dream warnings.

The image under the closing credits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Once Maggie figures out where Quentin’s chamber is, she decides that David must be there. She resolves to go to the chamber and find David. Julia tells her it is too dangerous for the two of them to go to Quentin’s stronghold alone, and insists they wait until Barnabas can join them. Julia goes to fetch Barnabas. When she brings him back to the Old House, Maggie says that now she can’t find Amy. Julia decides to look for Amy while Maggie and Barnabas go to the great house.

It might seem odd that Julia thinks it is OK for Maggie to go to the great house accompanied only by Barnabas when it would have been too dangerous had she herself been Maggie’s only companion. But Julia knows that Barnabas is not an ordinary man. He has been free of the effects of the vampire curse for almost a year, but his history made it possible for him to travel back in time in #661. It seems that he retains enough connection with the supernatural to make him a more formidable adversary for Quentin than is even so adroit a mad scientist as Julia.

Amy overhears Maggie’s conversations, and she goes to the west wing. She uses a crowbar to open the panel that leads to Quentin’s chamber. She goes in and calls for David. David is not there, but Quentin is. Amy tries to tell Quentin that she had come to warn him that Maggie and Barnabas were on their way; as her attempt to lie to Maggie had crumbled when Maggie kept questioning her, so her attempt to deceive Quentin collapses as he keeps staring at her. Amy’s face goes blank, and we realize that Quentin is transmitting commands into her mind.

Barnabas and Maggie do go to the room and they do find the opening in the panel. Barnabas looks through it, and sees a door on the other side. The opening is a small one, close to the floor. The children have been crawling through it, and evidently Maggie did the same in her dream. But Barnabas does not intend to get his suit dirty. He picks up the crowbar, and says he will rip out all the panels and walk through the door.

Barnabas is not going to crawl through that thing. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 696: Not anywhere at all

The ghost of Quentin Collins drove all of his living relatives out of the great house on the estate of Collinwood the other day, and now he has fetched two of them back. They are twelve year old David Collins and nine year old Amy Jennings. Today, governess Maggie Evans, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas’ bedraggled servant Willie Loomis search the great house looking for the children.

When they find Amy, she is possessed by the evil spirits and insists that the house is where she belongs. She willingly leaves with Willie. When they get back to Barnabas’ house, she calmly tells Willie that he will never again have reason to worry about Maggie. “Maggie is not anywhere anymore… anywhere at all. You’ll see.” In the great house, Barnabas finds that Maggie has been dressed in clothing appropriate to the period when Quentin lived, the 1890s. She does not recognize him or respond to her own name. When he asks who she is, she struggles, then faints.

Barnabas finds Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Dark Shadows first became a hit in May and June of 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire trying to erase Maggie’s personality and overwrite it with that of his lost love Josette. Since then, Maggie’s memory has been wiped, Barnabas has been cured, and the show has made it clear they will not be revisiting the question of whether he will have to pay for his crimes against her. They are great friends now. It is ironic that Barnabas is the one trying to get Maggie to return to herself, but it does further confirm that Maggie’s memory of her days in his dungeon is gone for good.

In a comment about John and Christine Scoleri’s post about this episode on their Dark Shadows Before I Die, someone known as “D. Wor” points out that the dress Maggie is wearing when Barnabas finds her harks back to his attempted Josettification of her:

I remember this episode well. At first I thought the Victorian dress Maggie suddenly was wearing didn’t add up to anything Josette-essential until I took a good look at the colours. I thought the dark green sash was horribly out of place, and then? I realized all three of those colours are representative of Josette’s bedroom at The Old House. The green sash represented her drapes. Wild, eh?
Comment left 25 February 2019 by “D. Wor” on “Dark Shadows Episode 696: 2/24/69” (25 February 2019) at Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri.

In Friday’s episode, Barnabas meditated on the idea that he and Quentin never knew about each other. Longtime viewers, seeing Maggie out of touch with her own identity and her proper time, might wonder if Quentin now knows what Barnabas did to her in 1967 and if he is taunting him with a reminder of it.

Episode 694: Enough tragedy in this house

For months, the evil ghost of Quentin Collins has been gaining strength, secretly manipulating children Amy Jennings and David Collins as he prepares to drive everyone from the great house of Collinwood so that he can have the place to himself. Now he has cast aside all secrecy and he openly menaces the adult residents of the house. Today, they give up and leave. Once they are all gone, Quentin stands on the walkway at the top of the staircase in the foyer and laughs heartily.

Collinwood belongs to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz’ brother Roger, David’s father, lives there as her guest. Up to this point, Liz and Roger have served primarily as blocking figures. Each is devoted to denial as a way of life. Occasionally a fact bursts upon them that is so enormous that one or the other of them has no choice but to face it for a little while. Usually they snap back into their characteristic mode of willful ignorance the moment the crisis is past, and even while it is going on the other responds by digging even deeper into the insistence that nothing is happening. When I first watched Dark Shadows, I could imagine the characters fleeing Collinwood one by one, then venturing back to get Liz and Roger, only to find them sitting serenely in the drawing room, assuring their would-be rescuers that everything was all right while leather-winged demons fluttered about their heads.

On Monday, Liz saw enough of Quentin’s power that she gave up her attitude of denial, apparently forever. Today, Roger does what we have been led to expect, and loudly declares that the whole issue is imaginary and that the other adults should be ashamed of themselves for encouraging the children to be afraid of ghosts. When the whole house starts to resound with the crepuscular tones of an old-timey waltz Quentin plays when he is exercising power, Roger declares that it is a trick the children are playing on them. The others go to pack their things while Roger stays in the drawing room.

Alone there, Roger sees Quentin materialize before him. On their way out, Liz and occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes check the drawing room one last time, and find Roger sitting motionless in a chair. For a moment we wonder if he will fall over dead. He starts speaking, though, and admits that he was wrong. As they leave, Roger looks back into the house and shouts a defiant pledge to return. Apparently the makers of Dark Shadows have decided they no longer need two major characters whose primary function is to put the brakes on the action.

Roger reacts to the sight of Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After everyone has gone, the camera pans across sets representing several rooms in the great house. This must have taken some doing. The foyer and drawing room were the only standing sets; the others were built as needed. The show was done live to tape, so these sets must all have been standing simultaneously. The studio was not very big at all. I wonder if they crammed some of these into space that was not generally used for action.

The walkway at the top of the foyer stairs is a commanding position, and the show has been sparing in its use of it. Quentin’s triumphant laugh is the first time we see a villain stand there and exult in his new position as Master of Collinwood. In the early days of the show, the dashing and enigmatic Burke Devlin threatened to take control of the house. He never came very close to doing that, but it could have been interesting to see him stand on the walkway, survey the foyer, and think about the day when the house would be his. For a long period in 1967, seagoing con man Jason McGuire was bossing Liz around; there were several days when he might have stood on the walkway, looked around with smug satisfaction, and chuckled.

Yesterday’s episode ended with the drapes in a bedroom in flames. That was a real fire, not a special effect, and you could see it spreading rapidly and putting out a lot of smoke. Having failed in that attempt to murder everyone in the building, the technical staff in today’s reprise of the sequence settles for lighting some gas burners behind a window dressing.

Episode 692: The only existing link

There are two ongoing narrative threads in this part of Dark Shadows. One is the story of mysterious drifter Chris Jennings. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman knows Chris to be a werewolf and she is trying to help him. The other is the story of Quentin Collins, a ghost who is gradually gaining power and planning to drive everyone away from the great estate of Collinwood so that he can have the place to himself. Chris’ story had been the fast-paced A plot that kept expanding to involve more and more characters, while Quentin’s was the slow-paced B plot that consistently involved only Chris’ nine year old sister Amy, strange and troubled boy David Collins, and their governess Maggie Evans, with intermittent small parts for other established characters and the occasional chance for a day player to act a death scene. That changed yesterday, when Quentin decided that he had grown so strong he no longer needed to conceal himself from matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or the other adults in the great house. Quentin’s story is now the main topic, and Chris is the secondary feature.

We open today with Liz telling Julia what happened the night before. Julia tells Liz that she and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins had suspected that an evil ghost was at work in the house, and that they have seen another spirit that seems to be opposed to it. Liz says she has called occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes arrives and questions everyone.

Liz is alone at the desk in the drawing room when a secret panel leading to a passage to the long-deserted west wing opens. A cutout meant to suggest a disembodied hand appears on the screen. It picks up a letter opener from the desk and is about to stab her when Stokes enters.

Stokes shouts. The hand drops the letter opener and vanishes. He tells Liz what he saw. He notices the panel is open, and asks Liz about it. She says that it leads to the west wing, but that, as far as she knows, no one has used it in years. That answers a question that has been on the audience’s minds since October 1966. In that month, we saw Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, use the panel to play a dirty trick on well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. The panel was not seen or mentioned again until David and Amy started using it to do Quentin’s bidding several weeks ago. This line is our first confirmation that Liz knows that the panel and the passage behind it exist. Stokes asks Liz’ permission to perform an exorcism.

Meanwhile, Julia gets a telephone call from Chris. Liz’ daughter, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, has taken a fancy to Chris and installed him in a cottage on the estate. Chris tells her that he is facing an emergency. Someone has come to the village of Collinsport who might know his secret.

In the cottage, Chris tells Julia that an unpleasant man named Ned Stuart has brought his sister Sabrina to the village and that he is demanding Chris meet with Sabrina. Chris had assumed Sabrina was dead, because she was in the room with him one night two years before when he underwent the transformation into his lupine form. Ned had told Julia and Barnabas that he was looking for Chris because he wanted to know what happened to his sister; he had always referred to Sabrina in the past tense, leading them to assume she was dead. Now Chris is in a panic, convinced that Sabrina will tell the police about him and that he will be punished for the many, many homicides he has committed as the werewolf.

Julia points out that if Sabrina were going to do that, she could have done so at any time. He would already have been arrested. Sabrina must not have told Ned or anyone else what she saw, and Ned must be telling the truth when he says he does not know what happened the last time Chris and Sabrina were together. She persuades Chris to go to visit the Stuarts in their suite at the Collinsport Inn.

Julia accompanies Chris on the visit. Ned is irritated that Chris did not come alone. His remarks are uncomfortable to hear, chiefly because of actor Roger Davis’ habit of clenching his anal sphincters when he raises his voice, making him sound like he is suffering from agonizing constipation.

After Ned makes this fingernails-on-a-blackboard noise for a couple of minutes, he lets Chris and Julia into Sabrina’s room. She is in a catatonic state. Her hair is white, and her face is tinged with light blue makeup. The makeup makes her look haggard in color, but most TV sets in the USA in the 1960s received only in black and white. In black and white, the makeup is not very effective.

Ned says that Sabrina was like that when he found her, the morning after she paid her last visit to Chris’ apartment. Several takes of a framed copy of actress Lisa Blake Richards’ professional headshot invite us to imagine the before-and-after. Ned calls Sabrina’s attention to Chris; she rises from her chair, starts towards him, and collapses.

Episode 691: Too late to be afraid

Throughout its first 73 weeks, Dark Shadows was usually very slow-paced, even by the standards of a 1960s daytime soap. Major characters like matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, often seemed to exist solely for the purpose of refusing to accept the facts in front of their faces and thereby slowing down the progression of the plot. Even characters who did face facts would often as not have the memory of goldfish, so that weeks of character development would evaporate with a sudden display of inexplicable ignorance.

That changed when well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time in #365. For the next few months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s, and events came thick and fast. When Vicki returned to the present and Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, the show was a genuine hit. They tried to sustain the breakneck pace of the 1790s segment throughout 1968, with mixed success. That period was a Monster Mash, featuring multiple witches, vampires, mad scientists, Frankensteins, ghosts, and the Devil himself, or perhaps one of his middle managers. That attracted a new audience of preteen viewers, but all too often left the characters spinning their wheels as they tried to make room for each other within one small fishing village near Bangor, Maine.

A few months ago, they dumped all of those larger than life but ultimately unproductive figures and started concentrating on two storylines. The A story so far has been that of werewolf Chris and the efforts old world gentleman Barnabas and mad scientist Julia have made to keep him from killing quite so many people. That one has been moving along at a steady clip.

The B story has not progressed nearly as fast. At times, it has matched the leisurely pace of the show’s early days. Today is dedicated to that story, and in today’s pre-title teaser it appears that it has brought narrative progression to a total halt.

Maggie is the new governess in the great house of Collinwood, charged with the education of Chris’ nine year old sister Amy and of strange and troubled boy David. As usual, we open with a reprise of the previous episode. This time, the reprise is 5 minutes and 45 seconds of Maggie wandering around the house looking for the children and hearing voices, while doors open themselves. That was OK at the end of Friday’s installment, but on its own it is stupefying.

The story is that the evil spirit of the late Quentin is taking possession of David and Amy in order to destroy the Collins family and have the house to itself. It made sense that that story would start slow. Quentin was at first very weak. He existed only in a sealed chamber the children stumbled upon while exploring the long deserted west wing, and could influence events outside that chamber only by persuading them to do his bidding. He gradually gained the power to control one child at a time, and to manifest himself outside his little room. A while ago he was able to put strychnine into Chris’ drink; by the end of Friday’s episode he had Amy and David under his power simultaneously.

Once the action finally gets underway in today’s episode, Quentin is about to strangle Maggie and the children are screaming at him to stop. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson and Liz enter the room. Mrs Johnson sees Quentin, Liz does not. Maggie is unconscious and the children are in a state. By the end of the episode, Liz, Maggie, and Mrs Johnson know Quentin’s name, his plan, and his power. He has managed to create some kind of bubble around the house so that the people inside it cannot hear the rain. The children pass out. David comes to, and announces that it is too late to be afraid. He laughs maniacally, and in the background we also hear Quentin’s laughter.

Quentin no longer needs to hide from Liz and Mrs Johnson. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

With this slam-bang ending, the Haunting of Collinwood takes over as the A story and Liz forever sheds her role as a blocking figure. This phase of the show is approaching its climax, and there is a chance that what comes next will be exciting.

Episode 690: A different mood

We open with governess Maggie Evans entering the bedroom of strange and troubled boy David Collins. She had heard David’s screams and a man’s laughter coming from the room; the man is gone, and David is unconscious on the floor. He has a nasty burn on his arm, and as he is coming to he pleads with “Quentin” not to hurt him.

Once David is fully awake, Maggie asks who Quentin is. David frantically denies that there is any such person, and claims that the laughter she heard was his own voice as he was playing a make-believe game. She says that she knows he couldn’t have made those sounds. He points out that they are the only people in the room. Maggie does not even try to explain how anyone could have left the room unseen; she seems already to have concluded that Quentin is a supernatural being. Maggie identifies Quentin with a strange and frightening man she and housekeeper Mrs Johnson have both seen. David keeps trying to deny everything, and Maggie keeps telling him she wants to help. David sobs, and Maggie holds him.

Quentin is indeed a ghost who is taking possession both of David and of Maggie’s other charge, nine year old Amy Jennings. With their help, Quentin has so far killed two people, tried to kill two others, and set about trying to drive everyone off the estate of Collinwood. Up to this point, Maggie has failed completely to represent any sort of obstacle to Quentin. She is a poor disciplinarian who lets the children run rings around her even when they are themselves, and is altogether at sea when they are doing Quentin’s bidding. This scene promises a breakthrough. Maggie is the first of the adult characters to learn Quentin’s name, she does not flinch from the evidence of his uncanny nature, she vows to fight him, and David finds comfort in her arms.

The breakthrough does not come today, however. After a moment, David declares that no one can help him, and he rushes out of the room. He goes downstairs to the foyer and hears a knocking at the door. He opens it and sees notoriously abusive actor Roger Davis standing there. He reacts to that sight as anyone might, running away without a backward glance.

Maggie follows David downstairs. There is again some question as to how much of the body language in the next scene is the blocking the director gave as an interpretation of Maggie’s response to the character Ned Stuart and how much is Kathryn Leigh Scott’s reaction to Mr Davis. Maggie tells Ned she can’t talk because she must go out in search of David; as she prepares to exit, she circles around with as much space as possible between her and him, never quite making eye contact but glancing back every time he moves towards her. This is not a pattern of movement we have seen before on the show, even when a character was dealing with a vampire or some other murderous foe. Miss Scott looks very much like a woman alone with a man whom she does not trust not to assault her. If he had, it wouldn’t be the first time he has physically abused a castmate on camera.

A child’s voice is heard, singing the song “Inchworm.” It is Amy, and she is working a jigsaw puzzle in the drawing room. The drawing room brings out Amy’s musical side. She played “London Bridge” on the piano there in #656 and tapped a few random keys on the same instrument in #676. She is quite a good singer, perhaps not surprising since actress Denise Nickerson had been in the cast of the short-lived James Lipton/ Laurence Rosenthal Broadway musical Sherry! in 1967.

Ned enters and introduces himself to Amy. His lines are all perfectly polite and friendly. Amy is supposed to gradually sense that Ned is hostile to her big brother Chris and to become uncomfortable around him, but that is supposed to come at the end of their time together. As it plays out, she already seems uncomfortable when he first enters. A minute or so into the scene, Amy smiles at Ned. Nickerson was remarkably good at flashing quick smiles, but it doesn’t work this time. She looks like she is displaying her teeth to the dentist. When Amy is supposed to start edging away from him, Nickerson turns around and proceeds to her next mark at full speed. The camera pans back, but does not capture her movement- she has gone clean out of the shot, leaving Mr Davis alone in the frame.

She goes as far as she can as fast as she can.

Ned approaches Amy; he grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her back into the shot. Chris enters. Amy starts to warn him against Ned, and he tells her not to be afraid for his sake. Indeed, Chris is safe. It is only women and children who have to be afraid of Roger Davis.

Ned confronts Chris. Evidently something bad happened to Ned’s sister Sabrina. She can’t tell Ned what it was, but he thinks Chris is responsible and wants him to go with him to the Collinsport Inn to see her. Returning viewers know that Chris is a werewolf and that Sabrina saw him transform. He assumed that he had killed her while in his beastly form, and he is surprised to learn from Ned that she is still alive. Chris is a character we are supposed to sympathize with, so it is a bit disturbing that he does not seem particularly relieved to find that he did not kill Sabrina.

In the woods, Amy finds David. She learned some days ago that Quentin wants to hurt Chris, and she has been resisting Quentin’s influence ever since. She and David talk about ways they can work together to fight him. David says that he has decided to tell Maggie what has been happening; Amy objects that this is too dangerous. They seem to be getting somewhere when Quentin appears to them. They are terrified, and then resign themselves to their fate.

Later, the children are in the drawing room with Maggie. Amy is still working her jigsaw puzzle, and David is staring into the fireplace. Longtime viewers will remember that this is something his mother used to do. She was the show’s first supernatural menace and tried to lure David to his doom. Maggie’s predecessor, well-meaning governess Vicki, led the other characters in the campaign that saved David then. We wonder if Maggie will be able to match her success.

Maggie admires the puzzle and calls David over to look at it. David makes a show of being bored, leading Amy to remark airily that boys don’t like jigsaw puzzles. David complains that there is nothing to do. Maggie suggests the three of them sit down together for a heart-to-heart talk, an idea the children reject. They suggest a variety of games they might play. Maggie notices that their manner is quite different than it was earlier in the day. David is more assertive, Amy supercilious. She finally agrees to let them play dress-up.

In the first year of the show, the opening voiceovers often involved a weather report. “A cold wind blows from the sea to the great house of Collinwood, but the fog still hangs heavy on its vast lawns” that sort of thing. They stopped doing that some time ago, but today they slip in an almost comically detailed bit about atmospheric conditions- “Soon dark, threatening clouds will gather over Collinwood, and long, ever-lengthening shadows will creep menacingly toward the great house. By late afternoon, rain will come, a rain that will begin slowly but steadily increase into a raging storm.” You expect them to go on with “Expect cooler temperatures and clear skies after 8 PM, with a chance of frost in the morning.” But the rain, at least, plays a part in the story. It explains why David and Amy have to stay indoors, and a roar of thunder gives Amy a chance to sneeringly ask Maggie if she is frightened. It also occasions the use of this still of the exterior of the house, one which I do not believe we have seen before:

We don’t usually see that much of the lawn.

Later, Maggie goes to look for the children. She enters the study. This set has been familiar since early 1967, but today is the first time we see the outside of its door. Lately we have been seeing more of the little spaces that are supposed to join one room to another, part of a strategy to make the house seem like a bigger place.

The sequence before this suggests Maggie is heading into the long-deserted west wing, but once she goes through the door it is clearly the study.

Once in the study, Maggie hears Amy and David calling to her from no particular direction while Quentin laughs. She is bewildered, then the children join Quentin in laughing. His laughter is hearty, theirs is maniacal. Maggie goes out into the corridor, sees something frightening, and retreats into the study. She is only there for a moment when the doorknob starts turning. We end with Maggie staring directly into the camera, its lens representing the point of view of whatever it is that is terrifying her.

This is the first of only two episodes credited to writer Ralph Ellis. Dark Shadows never had more than three writers on staff at any time. I often wish they had had many more. Ellis is one of those whom I would have liked to see as a senior writer on the show right the way through. The episode is well-paced, the characters are clearly defined, and the dialogue is smooth with just a touch of wit. If he had been in charge of, let’s say, every Monday’s script, the whole series would have been a cut above what it actually was. Since he only contributed two scripts, it is especially sad that Roger Davis had to crap on one of them, but even when Mr Davis is on camera you can still tell that Ellis did his job well.

Episode 689: A victim of the werewolf

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins finds his distant cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, trying to pull the metal ring that opens the secret chamber hidden inside the old mausoleum.

Barnabas wants answers. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks what David was doing. He says he was upset with his governess, Maggie Evans, and was hiding from her. Barnabas gestures around the publicly known part of the mausoleum and says “There’s no place to hide here.” David vigorously agrees, and says he didn’t expect Maggie to come there at all. Barnabas asks if David was trying to get into the hidden chamber.

Panicked, David claims not to know what Barnabas is talking about. Barnabas reminds him that he caught him at the mausoleum in #315. Longtime viewers will recall that he subsequently found part of David’s pocket knife in the hidden chamber and confronted him with it, and David seems to remember that as well. He drops his attempt to deny knowing about the chamber, and tells Barnabas he heard an animal inside it.

This goes to the heart of the issue that has brought Barnabas to the mausoleum. Barnabas has befriended mysterious drifter Chris Jennings and has learned that Chris is a werewolf. When Chris is in his beastly form, Barnabas locks him in the hidden chamber to keep him from hurting anyone. The werewolf is in there now. He was growling and snarling when David arrived, but fell silent when Barnabas entered.

Barnabas asks how an animal could have got into the hidden chamber; David admits he can’t think of a way. He then asks David if he can hear the noise now; he says he can’t. He asks if he might have imagined the whole thing; he doesn’t disagree.

Barnabas takes David back home to the great house of Collinwood. His governess Maggie is waiting up for him. She stays in David’s room until he seems to be asleep, then kisses him on the forehead and goes.

Yesterday, David told Maggie that she is a pretty girl. He’s twelve now, old enough to get excited about that very conspicuous fact, so when he opens his eyes immediately after she leaves the room returning viewers might think the reason he faked being asleep was that he was angling for the kiss.

David went to the mausoleum to release the werewolf because the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins made him do it. Quentin has been dominating David lately. After Maggie goes, Quentin appears in the room and David confronts him. He says he does not want to be part of Quentin’s cruel schemes any longer. In response, Quentin causes David to suffer extreme pain. Passing by in the hallway, Maggie hears David’s scream and Quentin’s laugh, and she opens the door to find David curled up on the floor.

The laugh is noteworthy. Maggie hears it, and it is not a sound David could have made. She has already seen Quentin, but now she has further evidence that he exists. Moreover, it is the first time Quentin has broken his silence. We first met Quentin when he was in company with another ghost, a woman named Beth Chavez. Beth has spoken since then; we wonder when Quentin will have lines to deliver.